


your bones i let go and the dream did subside

by milenajesenskas



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Abuse, Drug Use, F/M, Gen, Mental Illness, Self-Harm, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-24
Updated: 2012-10-24
Packaged: 2017-11-16 23:51:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/545192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/milenajesenskas/pseuds/milenajesenskas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After two days without sleep, he could smell her perfume, see shadows in the corners of the room that moved like her.</p>
<p>After three days, he heard her laugh whenever he closed his eyes.</p>
<p>After four days, he threw his phone at the wall and called it an obsession. He got a new phone, new number, and went back home to sleep with his back against the wall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your bones i let go and the dream did subside

There was a woman in London, but she was never the cause, only a side-effect, one reason of many, not more to blame than anything else. He thought he loved her, but he didn't in the end. He was fascinated by her, drawn to her like a moth to a bulb, but that wasn't never the same.

It was cold and damp the night he met her, leaning on the bar of a musty club amongst a pack of bodies. She caught his eyes, rolled the chewed up stem of a cherry between her teeth and never, ever looked away. He sent a drink her way, paid for from his father's pocket, and she downed it before coming over to him. “You thought if you bought me a drink, I'd let you fuck me, right?”

“Well, I certainly wouldn't be _opposed_.”

“Direct. Interesting. Do you get a lot of luck with that one?” Her voice was low and sounded like a song, the hard vowels of New Jersey spilling from her lips.

“Depends. Nice tattoo. Is that a hawk?”

She grinned and ran her fingers across her hipbone. “An eagle. _Der Adler._ Buy me another drink.”

“Mind if I join you?”

“We'll see.”

She left after her drink, glancing back to be sure he was following. He was. She fucked him in an alley a few blocks away, and the sting of her breath was sharp against the cold. He held onto her like a drowning man, didn't stop leaving hungry kisses down her neck, and shoved a napkin with his number on it into her coat pocket. The cold fog turned to a soft misty rain as he let his head fall on her shoulder, shaking, panting, and laughing. She pried herself loose and fixed her skirt, leaving without saying a word. It was as silent as the city could ever be, with sirens echoing and bass pounding from cars and clubs. He sank down to the ground under the weight of something hollow in his stomach as the rain dug needles into his face.

The owner of a nearby shop found him there in the morning, asleep with his head against the wall. He was not-so-politely informed of a shelter down the road that he should go to instead before the shop owner called the cops.

 

She came back, drifting in and out of the corners of his eyes before coming in through his window. “Holmes.” 

“Adler.”

A grin spread over her lips at the fact that he'd followed her clues, and this one _would_ be fun after all. “Up for another go?”

“Ready when you are.”

He drowned himself in the thrill of sensations--the smell of her shampoo, the taste of salt on her skin--and found the overload of her body pressed against his was enough to make the buzzing behind his eyes stop. The next thing he knew, he was taking hits off her wrists and returning the favor. He could see his pulse as she ran her fingers through the remnants of powder, and this was it, he thought, he was alive. She fell back against his ratty old couch and let out a satisfied sigh.

“I found your number in my pocket.” She said, never content to sit in silence. “Better be careful with who you give stuff like that to, Holmes. Might get you into trouble one day.”

His head was too foggy to really hear what she was saying, and she was gone by the time he could sit up again.

 

It was the middle of the night sometime in September, and the windows rattled with the passing of a train. He payed no attention to it, but found a note stuck to the outside of his window while running a mug of coffee through the microwave.

_I can't stay here anymore._

_I'm sure you'll understand why._

_I destroyed my phone, so don't worry about your number._

_You know where to find me, but please don't._

 

The night she left town, he locked the door to his apartment, shut all the blinds, and closed himself in his bedroom. He had already trashed the living room, thrown the books off the shelves, broken the dishes that were in the sink, and the only thing left to do was to tear at himself even further. He closed his eyes against the prick of a needle in his skin and everything went white for a while. It was nice, just as he expected, like sitting with your head underwater.

He woke up to a nurse with lips like hers standing over him, and everyone kept saying how lucky he was to be alive. His mouth was dry and the inside of his skull was on fire and lucky was the last word he'd use for this.

 

The weeks after were the toughest, but he told himself that he'd get clean on his own, if only to get the last of her out of his system.

His father got him back in with his job doing consulting work, despite the drug charges. His hands shook too much to fill out the necessary paperwork at first, but he was good at what he did, so they let him back anyway. Everyone would look the other way when he showed up to a crime scene with bags under red eyes or blood on his sleeve because no one wanted to be responsible. He was a tool, not a friend, and the work he did kept it that way. There was an itch under his skin that he could never reach because it _was_ his skin. It was who he was. So he slept through the worst of it and put pieces together when he was awake. He was only a tool, but being so meant he had a purpose, something to focus himself on. It wasn't enough, it was never enough, but it was something.

 

It took a while, but the urges finally died down to a low rumble in the back of his mind like far away thunder. The drugs were out of his system now, which left his mind sharp. That was good, they said; he could finally live up to his potential. His mind was sharp, but it was sharp like broken glass and shrapnel, tearing gaping holes into everything it touched. He'd come home to blood on his hands from crescent marks left on his palms, and he couldn't sleep through the bad parts anymore. The buzzing in his head was louder now, screaming for him to rip through his skull to let it out, to tear himself apart just to relieve some of the pressure, and he knew he had to get out.

 

He checked himself into an uptown hotel, a boxcutter shoved in his coat pocket, and he could swear he smelled her perfume. The room he had for the night was small, but he could see the city from his window, with all the glow from headlights reflected off streets like life running through its veins. He sat himself down in the empty bathtub and tried to ignore the pressure in his chest screaming for a way out. Everything was silent except for the tapping of phone keys as he sent her an apology.

She had certainly changed her number by now, but it didn't really matter. It was a gesture more than anything.

There was blood in the tub and on the floor and the twenty-something housekeeping worker swore she was going to quit. He woke up from this too, with stitches in his wrists and a tube in his hand, but he still couldn't get it to stop.

His phone flashed an error screen, “message sending failed”.

 

They sent him home to his father's estate with a handful of prescriptions and orders to his father's staff to make sure that he took them. He spent his days in front of windows, staring out with eyes that were never focused on anything, until he finally conceded that the pills weren't working. It wasn't hard to pay off the bitter old staff member that was charged with keeping watch over him. A little money taken from his father's bank account and forced smiles were all he needed.

It didn't take long for him to replace bottles of pills with powder and needles, and he was convinced that this was all he'd ever be. He found that after a few incidents of not coming home for days at a time stopped them from looking. It was all a matter of trial and error.

After two days without sleep, he could smell her perfume, see shadows in the corners of the room that moved like her.

After three days, he heard her laugh whenever he closed his eyes.

After four days, he threw his phone at the wall and called it an obsession. He got a new phone, new number, and went back home to sleep with his back against the wall.

 

He started a fight in Camden, with bruises on his ribs before anyone started throwing punches. “Come on”, he would shout, night after night, while a man twice his size broke a bottle, broke his nose, never ever tore him down. “Is that really the best you can do?”

Afterward, there'd be blood in his throat and a throbbing in his head, but all of that meant he could lie still in his father's house, knowing that a man quickly approaching old age couldn't possibly do any worse than this.

 

The telephone rang back at the house and he hadn't been back in two weeks. His father didn't look for him anymore, so a housekeeper passes the phone off to his brother, and for the first minute, all he heard was muffled sobbing and the sound of a coat rubbing the receiver. After a minute and a half, his brother almost writes it off as a prank and hangs up, but he's beaten to it when the line goes dead.

The telephone rings once more before it's placed back on the stand, and this time, the sound of traffic rushed through the ear piece. “- _mean to, I'm sorry, please, I don't- I can't_ -”

“Sherlock?”

“ _I can't get it to stop, I can't get_ her _to stop-_ ”

“Where are you? What do- Can't get who to-”

His brother is cut off by the sound of the phone clattering against something hard and a car alarm blaring in the background, but he can still hear his little brother pleading to someone, _her_ , when it stops. “Can you hear me?” he tries, but no one answers. It takes a while, but he finally, reluctantly hangs up and calls the police. It feels too much like letting go.

 

The police find him an hour or two later, slumped on the floor of a dirty phone box. His face was wet and his wrist was bleeding, and he kept staring over the shoulder of one of the officers, never looking at either of their faces. He didn't give them a name, didn't say much of anything, and all they found in his pockets was the smashed pieces of an old phone.

It had been a year and a half since she'd left, but he could hear her voice now when the room was empty.

 

They lock him up, in a cell first, then a hospital room, and the words 'nervous breakdown' are tossed around like parade candy. _“This isn't working.”_ he hears his brother hiss at doctors just outside his room. _“He's just getting worse.”_

“I could hear you, you know.” he says to his brother once he comes to stand by his bed. He lets his head fall back against over-stuffed pillows and scratches at his stitches. “So you think I've got mad now too.”

“No, listen-”

“They've told me, don't bother. I suppose father won't be gracing us with his presence.” Mycroft didn't have to give him an answer because both of them knew it wasn't a question anymore. “Of course.”

“Go to sleep, Sherlock. I'll be here when you wake up.”

 

The air was full of the same misty rain the day Mycroft told him their father was shipping him off to America. For treatment, he said. A rehab facility. “It'll be easier there. You can get away from all this.”

“I like it here.”

“I like you still breathing.”

His bags were already packed for him, and the plane was scheduled for the day he was discharged. He had spent a month in that hospital, give or take, and those pastel walls and rough bedsheets were the last he would see of his city. This was just another goodbye he would never be granted.

 

He was sent off to New York city and even there, he still didn't know where to look for her. The pieces of his phone clattered around in his coat pocket and he never could throw them out. He found a scrap piece of paper in one of the boxes with a phone number written in his own hand. A drawing of a bird was scribbled next to it.

A machine answered, told him the number could not be completed as dialed.

The light from the street kept the shadows from hiding in the corners of the room. He couldn't hear her voice anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> title is from "gigantomachy" by cake bake betty


End file.
